Anyone who has explored the inner life to a certain extent is faced with a mystery. Apart from all the outer attractions in the world, at the heart of the human, there exists something profound and beautiful in itself, a beauty without features. The mystery is not so much that two different dimensions exist- an outer world (zahir) and the inner world (batin) – but that the human being is suspended between these two dimensions, as a space in which both meet. It is as if the human being is the meeting point, the threshold between two worlds.
Our modern languages are inadequate for describing or naming the qualities and the essence of this inner world. Perhaps the best word we have for ‘that which can grasp the unseen world of qualities’ is “the heart.” And what we understand by the word “heart” is an intelligence other than intellect, a knowing that operates at the subconscious level.
The human being is an instrument of cosmic creativity. The human heart is the mirror in which divine qualities and significances may appear. And the world is the mirror in which these qualities are reflected and known clearly. The cosmic creativity manifests itself in and through the human heart which has the capacity for interpreting the forms and events of material existence.
This subject may seem elusive because we are so conditioned to project qualities onto the things and events of the world that we overlook that everything of true significance is happening within us. Affection, itself, is a quality that exists in Reality itself and transcends both the heart and the object of affection. Another way of saying it is that we live in an affectionate universe and we know this through the relationship between the individual heart and the object of its affection.
A mature enlightenment is seeing all these projections for what they are: the heart, because of its nearness to the divine treasury, is primary; the world is the shadow. We need not withdraw these qualities into ourselves, because the mirror of the world receiving the projection of the heart has received the qualities of the divine source. This divine source, the heart, and the outer existence together form a unified Whole.
The heart occupies a position intermediate between the nafs (false self) and Allah. It becomes a point of contact between the two. Like a transformer, it receives the spiritualizing energy of the spirit and conveys it to the self. Like the physical heart it is the center of the individual psyche.
If it is dominated by the demands of the nafs, the heart is dead; it is not a heart at all. If it is receptive to spirit, then it can receive the qualities of spirit and distribute these according to its capacity to every aspect of the human being, and from the human being to the rest of creation. If it is receptive to spirit, a heart is sensitive, living, awake, whole. It becomes the treasury of God’s qualities.
In this, behold, there is indeed a reminder for everyone whose heart is wide-awake–that is who lends ear with conscious mind. [Qur'an 50:37]
It is through the heart that the completion of the human psyche is attained. The heart always has an object of love; it is always attracted to some sign of beauty. Whatever the heart holds its attention on, it will acquire its qualities. Those qualities are as much within the heart as within the thing that awakens those qualities in the heart. The situation is like two mirrors facing each other, while the original reflection comes from a third source. But one of these mirrors, the human heart, has some choice as to what it will reflect.
There are countless attractions in the world of multiplicity. Whatever we give our attention to, whatever we hold in this space of our presence, its qualities will become our qualities. If we give the heart to multiplicity, the heart will be fragmented and dispersed. If we give the heart to spiritual unity, to Allah, the heart will be unified.
Ultimately what the heart desires is unity in which it finds peace.
Truly, in the remembrance of Allah, hearts find peace.
The nafs desires multiplicity and suffers the fragmentation caused by the conflicting attractions of the world. Rabi’a, perhaps the greatest woman saint of the Sufi tradition, said: “I am fully qualified to work as a doorkeeper, and for this reason: What is inside me, I don’t let out. What is outside me, I don’t let in. If someone comes in, he goes right out again—He has nothing to do with me at all. I am a doorkeeper of the heart, not a lump of wet clay.”
We can assume the responsibility of being the doorkeeper of our own heart, choosing what we wish to keep within the intimate space of our own being.